eConsultation the Elton way

What’s different about Elton Consulting’s approach to eConsultation?

Elton Consulting has been producing award winning websites for its clients for over 15 years. The always advancing technologies means that we can now offer a greater range of options for interacting with your stakeholders. These are in addition to the features that you are already familiar with such as project information, frequently asked questions, links to project documentation and feedback forms.

How do you benefit?

As always, this depends upon your organisation’s communication strategy and the way you define your stakeholders. Here are a number of ways you might use our eConsultation services:

Public consultation about a plan or proposal

Meeting statutory requirements for consultation

Testing options with key stakeholders and communities of interest

Collecting data on potential suppliers and customers

Secure communication across your project team in a way that integrates disciplines, and saves money:

Moderated discussion about project issues

Document review and amendment

Document storage

As part of a change management strategy within your organisation that facilitates communication between:

Staff and/or

Clients and/or

Suppliers

What are the features on offer?

Feature

Description

Benefits

Content management system

A method of updating a website from within your organisation

Reduces reliance on sub-contractors

Speeds up process

Saves money

Moderated forum

Allows interested people and organisations to express their views directly, and interact with each other

A transparent form of consultation

Gives ability to intervene if misconceptions are gaining credibility

Subscribe functions

A mechanism for people and organisations to leave their contact details

Allows you to build a database of stakeholders

Facilitates communication through the consultation period and beyond

Saves money

On-line surveys

A structured method of gaining feedback about particular issues

A good method of testing opinion about particular aspects of a plan

Facilitates efficient reporting of the process

RSS feeds

Allows anyone to be notified when an update has occurred on your site

Keeps people in touch with progress with your plans

Social networking links

Sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube offer another dimension to imparting information and receiving feedback on it

Broadens the stakeholder base

Reaches a broader audience

Wiki functions

Documents can be placed on a website allowing people to leave their comments on them paragraph by paragraph.

Useful internal resource across teams

Can also work in the public domain

What are our eConsultation services?

Development of communication and consultation strategies of which e-Consultation is one component

Procurement advice

Website design and functionality

Content generation

Site and forum moderation

Site updates and maintenance

Analysis of feedback

Generation of consultation reports

What’s different about Elton’s services?

eConsultation is offered as a stand-alone service, or part of our integrated services; so it is often a subset of our broader services to you such as communication and consultation strategies, social research and community planning.

Our web services – will therefore depend upon:

The project’s needs and your paramount objectives

Who the stakeholders are and the purpose of communicating with them (websites are just one channel of communication and not appropriate in all circumstances)

Financial and human resources available to generate content and manage the site

Elton’s value

Our eConsultation services have been developed in-house with the minimum use of subcontractors. This results in fast turnaround times and value-for-money. For instance a standard website design and build is typically about $5,000 (excl. GST); this could include a basic survey form and feedback function. The same website with a customised interactive forum would typically cost $7,500 (excl. GST).

In other words by bringing the development of these products in-house, we have reduced costs and increased both functionality and value.